SENSE AND CHAOS

is there a difference between memes and shitposts in internet culture?

Abstract

The article examines how memes and shitposts—two widely disseminated products of digital culture—differ in their modes of enunciation, considering their structural, behavioral and communicative characteristics. The study aims to propose a technical distinction grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of utterance, enunciation and discourse genres, articulating these concepts with the multimodal and mimetic forms that characterize the circulation of humorous content on the internet. The research adopts a qualitative and exploratory approach, seeking to interpret complex communicative phenomena that remain insufficiently systematized in the academic field. To this end, it brings together specialized literature on memes, memetic behavior and participatory culture, in addition to studies that address shitposting from aesthetic, sociocultural and comparative perspectives. The methodology involves theoretical–conceptual analysis and the observation of representative examples, enabling an understanding of how each format operates in terms of visual composition, contextual relations and meaning effects. The results indicate that memes and shitposts share mimetic behaviors, replicating and transforming visual and discursive elements present in digital cultural pools. However, they diverge significantly in the way they relate to dialogic context. Memes function as meaning-utterances: they respond to specific situations, engage with events, convey positions and preserve thematic and communicative coherence. Shitposts, in turn, constitute noise-utterances: they produce humor through the deliberate absence of meaning, through visual and textual chaos, through breaks in expectation and through the interruption of communicative flow, diverting attention from context and rendering the creator’s intent opaque to the interlocutor. Although shitposts preserve the replicability and transformation typical of memetic behavior, they operate through disconnection, abstraction and shock. Based on these findings, the article concludes that shitposting can be understood as a subgenre of the meme, since it preserves a replicable structure while subverting communicative function by shifting the utterance into the domain of nonsense. The proposed differentiation contributes to advancing discussions on digital genres and highlights how meaning and noise participate in the construction of humor within internet culture. Furthermore, it opens paths for future investigations into the impacts of these formats on contemporary communication and on the evolving practices of digitally mediated language.